Ethnolinguistic Groups Research Articles

Admixture into and within sub-Saharan Africa.

Similarity between two individuals in the combination of genetic markers along their chromosomes indicates shared ancestry and can be used to identify historical connections between different population groups due to admixture. We use a genome-wide, haplotype-based, analysis to characterise the structure of genetic diversity and gene-flow in a collection of 48 sub-Saharan African groups. We show that coastal populations experienced an influx of Eurasian haplotypes over the last 7000 years, and that Eastern and Southern Niger-Congo speaking groups share ancestry with Central West Africans as a result of recent population expansions. In fact, most sub-Saharan populations share ancestry with groups from outside of their current geographic region as a result of gene-flow within the last 4000 years. Our in-depth analysis provides insight into haplotype sharing across different ethno-linguistic groups and the recent movement of alleles into new environments, both of which are relevant to studies of genetic epidemiology.

Promoting Unity in Diversity: The Imperative of Social Transformation for Managing Boko Haram Uprising in Nigeria

Since the attainment of flag independence in 1960, Nigeria has been grappling with how to ensure unity in diversity among its various regional, religious and ethno-linguistic groups. Successive governments have strategized different mechanisms aimed at promoting national integration including the establishment of the National Youth Service Corps, building of Unity Schools, state and locality creation, implementation of a Federal Character principle, and the zoning of power positions, among several public policies. Despite these measures, Nigeria remains divided and prone to sectarian violence. In the past, many had called for the convocation of a sovereign national conference to renegotiate the terms of Nigerian unity. Currently, the Boko Haram radical Islamic sect is engaged in a rebellion against the state in the hope of establishing a theocracy governed by Sharia law. This article interrogates the role of social transformation in mitigating the Boko Haram terrorism. It argues that Islamic extremism is a manifestation of poor governance, especially the inability of governments at all levels to mainstream the importance of tolerance among the diverse social groups particularly across religious divides. The article stresses the need for peace education, principally the use of social transformation as a management tool of identity conflict by inculcating the right values in people starting from childhood. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2016.v6n2p41

CNV analysis in the Lithuanian population.

BackgroundAlthough copy number variation (CNV) has received much attention, knowledge about the characteristics of CNVs such as occurrence rate and distribution in the genome between populations and within the same population is still insufficient. In this study, Illumina 770 K HumanOmniExpress-12 v1.0 (and v1.1) arrays were used to examine the diversity and distribution of CNVs in 286 unrelated individuals from the two main ethnolinguistic groups of the Lithuanian population (Aukštaičiai and Žemaičiai) (see Additional file 3). For primary data analysis, the Illumina GenomeStudio™ Genotyping Module v1.9 and two algorithms, cnvPartition 3.2.0 and QuantiSNP 2.0, were used to identify high-confidence CNVs.ResultsA total of 478 autosomal CNVs were detected by both algorithms, and those were clustered in 87 copy number variation regions (CNVRs), spanning ~12.5 Mb of the genome (see Table 1). At least 8.6 % of the CNVRs were unique and had not been reported in the Database of Genomic Variants. Most CNVRs (57.5 %) were rare, with a frequency of <1 %, whereas common CNVRs with at least 5 % frequency made up only 1.1 % of all CNVRs identified. About 49 % of non-singleton CNVRs were shared between Aukštaičiai and Žemaičiai, and the remaining CNVRs were specific to each group. Many of the CNVs detected (66 %) overlapped with known UCSC gene regions.ConclusionsThe ethnolinguistic groups of the Lithuanian population could not be differentiated based on CNV profiles, which may reflect their geographical proximity and suggest the homogeneity of the Lithuanian population. In addition, putative novel CNVs unique to the Lithuanian population were identified. The results of our study enhance the CNV map of the Lithuanian population.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12863-016-0373-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Birth order and mortality in two ethno-linguistic groups: Register-based evidence from Finland

Previous research has documented an association between birth order and suicide, although no study has examined whether it depends on the cultural context. Our aim was to study the association between birth order and cause-specific mortality in Finland, and whether it varies by ethno-linguistic affiliation. We used data from the Finnish population register, representing a 5% random sample of all Finnish speakers and a 20% random sample of Swedish speakers, who lived in Finland in any year 1987–2011. For each person, there was a link to all children who were alive in 1987. In total, there were 254,059 siblings in 96,387 sibling groups, and 9797 deaths. We used Cox regressions stratified by each siblings group and estimated all-cause and cause-specific mortality risks during the period 1987–2011. In line with previous research from Sweden, deaths from suicide were significantly associated with birth order. As compared to first-born, second-born had a suicide risk of 1.27, third-born of 1.35, and fourth- or higher-born of 1.72, while other causes of death did not display an evident and consistent birth-order pattern. Results for the Finnish-speaking siblings groups were almost identical to those based on both ethno-linguistic groups. In the Swedish-speaking siblings groups, there was no increase in the suicide risk by birth order, but a statistically not significant tendency towards an association with other external causes of death and deaths from cardiovascular diseases. Our findings provided evidence for an association between birth order and suicide among Finnish speakers in Finland, while no such association was found for Swedish speakers, suggesting that the birth order effect might depend on the cultural context.

Naming, nation, and negotiations: Kodavas and their ‘illegible’ identities

This paper draws from the idea that acts of naming have constantly changed and that practices of naming need to be located in a larger network of practices and histories that to various extent determine a community's changing notions of identity. I explore these changing notions of identity as performed through acts of naming among the Kodavas, an ethno-linguistic minority group from the Kodagu district, Karnataka State, India. My objective in this paper is to look at naming from three perspectives, constantly interacting with each other. I study naming from three different temporal locations, as informed by various factors. Firstly, what one might tenuously call as conventional naming practices among the Kodavas. Secondly, how these practices were affected by acts of legibility brought in through colonial intervention and thirdly, the gradual but perceptible shifts in contemporary naming practices that negotiate between legibility of a modern nation, legibility of a majoritarian Hindu practice and of a desired Kodava identity. My analysis points to fluidity of practices that can be termed ‘illegible’ to dominant practices thereby asserting identity in creative ways. Illegibility, I argue, makes identities unstable, less knowable and thereby not easy to contain.

Floreas into Virágs: State Regulation of First Names in Dualist Hungary

The Kingdom of Hungary instituted the civil registry of births, marriages, and deaths in 1894. While the new institution was both eulogized and criticized as a major step in the separation of church and state and toward the creation of a modern, secular Hungary, it also opened up a new path for nation building. In this exceedingly multilingual and multinational country, churches often acted as proxies of cultural and political institutions for the national minorities. In the present article, I examine the specifically nation-building aspects embodied in the new regulation for the official use of first names that accompanied Act XXXIII of 1894 on the civil registry, and focus particularly on Romanian first names. Due to their considerable mismatch with Hungarian first names, Romanian names posed a special challenge to policy makers, and for this reason they demonstrate some less obvious dimensions of the changes instituted in 1894. The geographic parameters of this investigation have been imposed by the spatial framework of a wider research project on the interconnections among language, nationalism, and social change in the eastern part of Dualist Hungary, a territory encompassing Transylvania, the easternmost counties of contemporary Hungary proper (according to the administrative division created in 1876), and the eastern two-thirds of the Banat. This framework enables me to make comparisons with other ethnolinguistic groups, notably Transylvanian Saxons and the Catholic Germans of the Banat.

Ethnic Inequality.

This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity economic inequality across countries. First, combining satellite images of nighttime luminosity with the historical homelands of ethnolinguistic groups we construct measures of ethnic inequality for a large sample of countries. We also compile proxies of overall spatial inequality and regional inequality across administrative units. Second, we uncover a strong negative association between ethnic inequality and contemporary comparative development; the correlation is also present when we condition on regional inequality, which is itself related to under-development. Third, we investigate the roots of ethnic inequality and establish that differences in geographic endowments across ethnic homelands explain a sizable fraction of the observed variation in economic disparities across groups. Fourth, we show that ethnic-specific inequality in geographic endowments is also linked to under-development.

Dealing with farmers’ Ethnolinguistic differences when collecting crop diversity on-farm

AbstractIdentification and characterization of the farmers’ named crop varieties cultivated around the world is a major issue for conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources. Intraspecific diversity is strongly determined by farmers’ socio-cultural environment, but this has little been documented. In this paper, we tested, on a contact zone among three ethnolinguistic groups located on the Mount Kenya region, whether farmers’ socio-cultural differences have an impact on the morphological characteristics of the farmers’ named sorghum varieties. Eighteen qualitative morphological traits of the panicles were measured. We first compared the morphological diversity of the named varieties among ethnolinguistic groups using multivariate analysis of homogeneity of groups’ dispersion and tested their differentiation using permutational multivariate analysis of variance. Discriminant analysis of principal components was then used to categorize the morphological diversity withouta priori, and this classification was compared with farmers’ local taxonomy (vernacular names) in the three ethnolinguistic groups. Our results show that some morphotypes are peculiar to some ethnolinguistic groups and that a morphotype can bear different variety names while the same variety name can be used to identify different morphotypes. Morphological differentiation that was explained by ethnolinguistic groups was higher for local landraces than for improved varieties. Our findings imply that socio-cultural diversity of farmers and the criteria they use to identify and maintain landraces need to be considered in studying and sampling crop diversity forin situas well as forex situconservation.

The Complex Admixture History and Recent Southern Origins of Siberian Populations.

Although Siberia was inhabited by modern humans at an early stage, there is still debate over whether it remained habitable during the extreme cold of the Last Glacial Maximum or whether it was subsequently repopulated by peoples with recent shared ancestry. Previous studies of the genetic history of Siberian populations were hampered by the extensive admixture that appears to have taken place among these populations, because commonly used methods assume a tree-like population history and at most single admixture events. Here we analyze geogenetic maps and use other approaches to distinguish the effects of shared ancestry from prehistoric migrations and contact, and develop a new method based on the covariance of ancestry components, to investigate the potentially complex admixture history. We furthermore adapt a previously devised method of admixture dating for use with multiple events of gene flow, and apply these methods to whole-genome genotype data from over 500 individuals belonging to 20 different Siberian ethnolinguistic groups. The results of these analyses indicate that there have been multiple layers of admixture detectable in most of the Siberian populations, with considerable differences in the admixture histories of individual populations. Furthermore, most of the populations of Siberia included here, even those settled far to the north, appear to have a southern origin, with the northward expansions of different populations possibly being driven partly by the advent of pastoralism, especially reindeer domestication. These newly developed methods to analyze multiple admixture events should aid in the investigation of similarly complex population histories elsewhere.

The English Experience Serves as a Pronunciation Guide Allowing Students by Analogy to Learn Spelling in Taiwan Aboriginal Languages: An Example of the Amis Ethnicity

Orthography is a set of conventions for representing language in written form; written forms are made up of graphic words, and such words, taking English for example, are composed by individual graphs or letters that represent sounds. Thus, writing systems are conventional visible marks for human communication (Gelb,1963: 12; Burnaby, 1997: 59; DeLancey, 1998). Written communication, furthermore, allows a culture to communicate in written form with its ancestors and with its progeny by crossing physical and time boundaries. All aboriginal languages spoken in Taiwan were in the past orally transmitted. As Fishman (1980: 169) writes, “Unless they are entirely withdrawn from the modern world, minority ethno-linguistic groups need to be literate in their mother tongue (as well as in some language of wider communication).” However, the language becomes vastly easier to learn and literacy is improved when the writing system is consistent. In Taiwan since 2001, English has been taught in our educational system from the fifth grade of the primary school onward. Students, therefore, know the alphabet and learn both the shapes of its 26 letters, the letter names, and the phonemic correspondence to these graphs, and it would be much easier to learn a system of phonetics for a pre-literate or semi-literate people group that uses letters found in the English alphabet, for the English experience serves as a pronunciation guide allowing students by analogy to learn spelling in their aboriginal languages. My intention in this paper through action research is to share what has been done for over thirty years to capitalize upon the fact that the students in Taiwan are already familiar with alphabetic writing because of their prior study of English. They would, therefore, be well-placed to transfer the regular sound-letter association which they have learned in English classes to the representation of the sounds of the various aboriginal languages of Taiwan. The great benefit of it is to make acknowledgement of the theme of translingualism, a process of empowerment. This empowerment of us in our daily life might produce an environment that fosters maturity and responsibility for our own circumstances. In a word, it would be easier to learn a system of phonetics that uses letters found in the English alphabet that serve as a pronunciation guide while making analogy in learning aboriginal languages.

Social context, parental exogamy and Hakka language retention in Taiwan

ABSTRACTThe Hakka people, the largest ethno-linguistic minority group in Taiwan, have found their ethnic language retention diminishing. Using the data collected by the Taiwan Education Panel Survey and Beyond in 2010, we are the first to study its reason for decrease. Results indicate that out-marriage amongst Hakka people and losing ethnic concentration are the major factors preventing Hakka language retention.

Dietary lycopene and cardiovascular health in ethnic Lithuanians

Background. Lycopene is a potent antioxidant, and it has been suggested that intake of lycopene-rich food results in a decreased risk of cardiovascular dis­eases. However, no official recommendation of lycopene consumption from natural dietary sources exists, and intake data of the Lithuanian population are limited. The goal of this study was to evaluate the median intake of lycopene in ethnic Lithuanians and to relate lycopene intake with biochemical blood risk factors for CVD in the general population and different ethnolinguistic groups. Materials and methods. One thousand one hundred forty randomly selected individuals (2–85 years of age) from six Lithuanian ethnolinguistic regions provided 3-day diet records for evaluation of lycopene consumption. Individuals were interviewed using a validated questionnaire consisting of lifestyle and clinical data. Serum concentrations of total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglyceride, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, glucose, apolipoprotein A-I, apolipoprotein B, lipoprotein (a) were measured using standardised procedures. Due to the non-normal distribution of variables, nonparametric tests were applied using the IBM SPSS v20.0 software. Results. The mean dietary lycopene intake in the study population was 5.05 ± 7.48 or 0.07 ± 0.11 mg/kg body weight per day. Major food sources of lycopene were tomatoes and tomato products (79%). The lycopene intake from natural dietary sources varied significantly between the Lithuanian ethnolinguistic groups (the lowest intake 3.52 ± 5.64 mg/day, the highest intake 6.22 ± 7.66 mg/ day, p = 0.01) and genders (women 5.26 ± 7.78 mg/day and men 4.8 ± 7.22 mg/ day, p = 0.01). The mean lycopene intake was significantly (p

Maya Healers' Conception of Cancer as Revealed by Comparison With Western Medicine.

PurposeCultural diversity in clinical encounters is common, yet mental constructions regarding cancer that influence expected treatment are poorly studied for indigenous people. We explored Maya healers' conceptions, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer to remedy this problem.MethodsIn-depth structured interviews with 67 traditional Maya healers in Guatemala across Kaqchikel, Kiche', Mam, Mopan, and Q'eqchi' ethnolinguistic groups were conducted by using a transdisciplinary format. Analysis of qualitative data in categorized matrixes allowed for statistical examination of tendencies and the results were complemented by validation workshops with Maya representatives.ResultsMaya classification of diseases has broad categories of malignant diseases including cancer. Specific Maya terms might equate to particular cancer types, which would open new avenues for research. Notions of malignancy and metastasis were expressed by healers as core characteristics of cancer, a disease believed to be both material and spiritual. Resolution of and/or treatment for cancer is based on restoring physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual equilibrium of the patient and extending that equilibrium to his larger social circle.ConclusionMaya conceptions of cancer determine how traditional diagnostic tools are used and dictate treatment options that include the patient's social-spiritual support system. Official health care providers' understanding of these principles can improve implementation of culturally appropriate protocols that increase indigenous patients' compliance and reduce rates of treatment abandonment.

De maíz y de frijol: El paso de verbo final a verbo inicial en tepehuano del sureste (o'dam)

El texto o’dam (tepehuano del sureste) que analizamos a continuación es resultado del trabajo conjunto que hemos venido realizando durante los últimos cuatro años. El texto corresponde a una narración registrada en octubre de 2010 en la localidad de Tobaatam, ‘La Guajolota’, en Mezquital, Durango. La presentación del texto incluye transcripción en el alfabeto práctico, segmentación morfológica, glosado y traducción al español. En el estudio subrayamos la importancia que tiene la agricultura del maíz entre los o’dam, en relación con los grupos etnolingüísticos vecinos de la región histórico-cultural del Gran Nayar: huichol, cora, mexicanero y tepecano (lengua ya extinta). Además, mostramos que el tepehuano del sureste en la actualidad refleja características de una lengua de verbo inicial con ciertas correspondencias de lengua de verbo final.

Cultural Influences in Women-Friendly Labor-Saving Hand Tool Designs: The Milk Churner Case.

Objective:The aim of this study was to highlight the importance of culture in sustainable, labor-saving solutions design for women in low-resource settings.Background:One of the reasons behind the gender asset gap among Sub-Saharan African women is the higher labor burden these women face, making it difficult for them to produce for the home and markets. Hand tools are the simplest form and therefore the best first step to address this problem. But designing women-friendly (sustainable) hand tools calls for better understanding of the low-resource settings where these women reside.Method:A milk churner was redesigned using a human-centered (participatory) approach with groups of women from two dominant ethnolinguistic groups of Bantu and Nilotic of Uganda, and its usability was tested.Results:The churner reduced labor up to eightfold and has potential to expand the range of uses to include children and husbands due to its simplicity. Also, the churner significantly reduced undesirable health effects, like pain in knee joints. Based on the experience with the churner, a six-item “survival guide” is proposed to complement human-centered design guiding principles for facilitating the generation of solutions in low-resource settings.Conclusion:By paying great attention to culture in relation to human factors, a labor-reducing churner has been successfully introduced among Ugandan women. The ultimate goal is to make the churner available to female smallholder dairy-farming households throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.Applications:This study provides a survival guide for generating solutions to problems from low-resource settings.

Anthropometric characteristics of female smallholder farmers of Uganda – Toward design of labor-saving tools

Sub-Saharan African women on small-acreage farms carry a disproportionately higher labor burden, which is one of the main reasons they are unable to produce for both home and the market and realize higher incomes. Labor-saving interventions such as hand-tools are needed to save time and/or increase productivity in, for example, land preparation for crop and animal agriculture, post-harvest processing, and meeting daily energy and water needs. Development of such tools requires comprehensive and content-specific anthropometric data or body dimensions and existing databases based on Western women may be less relevant. We conducted measurements on 89 women to provide preliminary results toward answering two questions. First, how well existing databases are applicable in the design of hand-tools for sub-Saharan African women. Second, how universal body dimension predictive models are among ethnic groups. Our results show that, body dimensions between Bantu and Nilotic ethnolinguistic groups are different and both are different from American women. These results strongly support the need for establishing anthropometric databases for sub-Saharan African women, toward hand-tool design.

Heterogeneity of nutritional habits of Lithuanian ethnolinguistic groups: population-based study.

Background.Lithuania is a Northern European country consisting of two main ethnolinguistic groups: Samogitians and Highlanders. The objective of the paper is to investigate differences in nutritional habits of 18–65-year-old Lithuanians living in different ethnolinguistic regions.Materials and methods.A representative, population-based, random sample of the 18–65-year-old ethnic Lithuanian population was interviewed from 17 December 2008 to 20 May 2013. Lithuanians living in their ethnolinguistic region for at least three generations were included (n = 1,133). We analysed responses to 12 questions about nutritional habits of respondents. For the univariate analysis, we applied the chi-squared test. For the clusterisation of the survey questions, we employed a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA).Results.Comparing Samogitians’ and Highlanders’ responses according to their gender, education, and place of residence, we observed more often significant differences (p < 0.05) for the urban population, respondents without higher education, and women. The nutrition of Highlanders was more consistent with national and WHO nutritional recommendations. Significant differences were obtained in the consumption of fish (p = 1.9 · 10–12), milk (p = 1.8 · 10–4) and grain products (p = 0.01). MCA revealed that all questions fall into three groups with a different composition for Samogitians and Highlanders. We failed to demonstrate the impact of different nutritional habits on the body mass index.Conclusions.According to the univariate and multivariate analysis, the nutritional habits of Lithuanian ethnolinguistic regions are heterogeneous. Dependency on an ethnolinguistic region might be considered an important factor for the preparation of appropriate health and nutrition education and disease prevention programmes. The issue of excess weight remains equally important for both ethnolinguistic groups.

Subnational Diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from a New Dataset

This paper presents a new dataset on subnational ethnolinguistic diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa covering 36 countries and almost 400 first-level administrative units. We compile detailed data on the ethnolinguistic composition of each region using population censuses and large-scale household surveys and match all reported ethnicities to Ethnologue, the most complete classifier of world languages. This matching allows to standardize the notion of an ethnolinguistic group and account for the relatedness between language pairs when calculating diversity indices. We exploit this high-quality dataset to investigate the connection between diversity, as captured by fractionalization and polarization indices, and development indicators at the subnational level. Educational and health outcomes, electricity access, and nighttime luminosity are all negatively related to diversity, even after controlling for country fixed effects and a rich set of regional characteristics, but only if the underlying ethnolinguistic groups are sufficiently aggregated into more basic language families or if linguistic similarities between them are taken into account. In other words, only deep-rooted diversity based on cleavages formed in the distant past is strongly inversely associated with regional development. Furthermore, we show that subnational diversity is remarkably persistent over time implying that reverse causality is unlikely to bias our main findings.

Archaeology in the 4ures Rapids of the Middle Orinoco, Venezuela

This paper briefly reports on the initial results of a new Leverhulme-sponsored four-year archaeological project (RPG 234- 2014) centred on the Atures Rapids area of the Middle Orinoco River, Amazonas State, Venezuela (Fig. 1). The Cotua Island Reflexive Archaeology Project seeks to establish the longue duree historical processes that by early colonial times culminated in the region’s reputation for being a key crossroads – where diverse ethno-linguistic groups from far-flung regions converged to trade (Oliver et al. 2014). Harnessing new evi- dence, it aims to elucidate how interaction between such diverse indigenous groups unfolded and the role it played in forg- ing ethnogenesis. Through archaeological research, it seeks to gain new insights into its history and elucidate regional patterns of exchange through the study of technical andstylisticdimensionsofmaterialculture. It also aims to investigate the abundant pre-colonial rock art and its relationships to the landscape and aboriginal oral tradi- tions. Finally, it seeks to understand how Western and Non-western archaeological knowledge is produced by engaging with the current indigenous groups as partners in (re)constructing history.

Types of Spatial Mobility and the Ethnic Context of Destination Neighbourhoods in Estonia

Most studies of the ethnic composition of destination neighbourhoods after residential moves do not take into account the types of moves people have made. However, from an individual perspective, different types of moves may result in neighbourhood environments that differ in terms of their ethnic composition from those in which individuals previously lived. We investigate how the ethnic residential context changes for individuals as a result of different types of mobility (immobility, intra-urban mobility, suburbanisation, and long-distance migration) for residents of the segregated post-Soviet city of Tallinn. We compare the extent to which Estonian- and Russian-speakers integrate in residential terms. Using unique longitudinal Census data (2000-2011) we tracked changes in the individual ethnic residential context of both groups. We found that the moving destinations of Estonian- and Russian-speakers diverge. When Estonians move, their new neighbourhood generally possesses a lower percentage of Russian-speakers compared with when Russian-speakers move, as well as compared with their previous neighbourhoods. For Russian-speakers, the percentage of other Russian-speakers in their residential surroundings decreases only for those who move to the surburbs or who move over longer distances to rural villages. By applying a novel approach of tracking the changes in the ethnic residential context of individuals for all mobility types, we were able to demonstrate that the two largest ethnolinguistic groups in Estonia tend to behave as 'parallel populations' and that residential integration in Estonia is therefore slow.